Julian Eßer

Julian Eßer is a research associate in Robotics and AI at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics in Dortmund. After receiving his B.S. and M.S. (with distinction) in mechanical engineering from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany in 2018 and 2020, respectively, he currently is conducting his PhD on learning-based control of highly dynamic robots at TU Dortmund. His research focus there lies in the field of Embodied AI, in particular the intersection of robotics, reinforcement learning, and physics-based simulation.

Current research topics:

• Machine Learning for robust whole-body control of highly dynamic robots in uncertain environments and human-machine interaction
• Embedding knowledge into reinforcement learning to accelerate the training process and improve performance for real-world robotics settings
• Reducing the sim-to-real gap by more accurate robot simulation models with data-driven methods based on real-world data

Special interests:

The fascinating intersection of Embodied AI between robotics, reinforcement learning, and physics-based simulation for learning robust control of robots moving and interacting dynamically with their environments.